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Cheated of Childhood

St Petersburg was once the glittering capital of Russia. Today its magnificent metro stations have become home to a generation of street children who survive by begging, informal child labour or prostitution. The end of communism may have brought many positive economic changes in the lives of ordinary Russians, but it’s also led to soaring rates of unemployment, alcoholism and family breakdown - driving children as young as seven to leave home to seek some kind of a living on the streets.

There are believed to be over a million homeless children in Russia, and in St Petersburg alone, 16,000 children live on the streets. President Vladimir Putin has described the situation as the ‘most threatening of his country’s economic and social indicators’.

In ‘Cheated of Childhood’, 11-year old Yuriy and his 13-year old buddy Max describe their life in the eastern suburbs of St. Petersburg - from the attic hovel where they sleep during the day at the top of an eight-story apartment block, to the computer clubs where they stay up all night in order to avoid the unwanted attentions of paedophiles or the police and social workers they don’t trust.

Max explains that they live off dry pasta - they have nothing to cook on. Max and Yuriy have been living together for the last eight months, and they share their ‘home’ with two kittens they rescued. They ran away from home for different reasons - Yuriy was being beaten by his alcoholic stepfather, and Max had no parental support - his mother is dead and his father was never at home. They’ve both abandoned school and neither of them want to return home or to move to the government shelters which have been offered to them. They met on the streets when they were begging.

Most street children in St.Petersburg hang around the Metro stations to beg from passing pedestrians. Max explains: "We come here every morning, day or night. We come here to these kiosks and we start begging. Sometimes we ask for change and sometimes we ask for food." Yuriy completes the description of their day: "Sometimes we have to collect empty bottles, whenever we can find them. And then we sell them. That’s how we get our money. From six or seven in the afternoon we try to get money for the computer games. We get back from the computer club at about eight in the morning, and sleep until late - five or six in the afternoon."

It’s a dangerous life. Max: "For me, the most dangerous thing about living on the street - in attics and cellars - is paedophiles. That’s the most dangerous thing… I know lots of people, who have been - how do you put this? - abused." Some of their friends sell sex to survive. In the last few years the St Petersburg authorities have set up a force of special, child-friendly police to help - and protect - the growing number of children who live on the streets. But the boys run away from them to avoid being sent to the young offenders’ unit - and from there to reform school, shelters, an orphanage or even prison.

Teams of social workers have been introduced - but the boys don’t really trust them either. Nataliya Evdokimova, Head of the St Petersburg Committee of Social Affairs, admits: "Our children’s homes are out-dated - big, prison like institutions that house 150 to 200 people… The children live in huge rooms like army barracks, and there is no personal attention to anyone."

Vera Smirnova works for the NGO ‘The Protection of Children’, (a partner in the ILO’s programme for working street children). "Sometimes we have to visit these children many times because most of them don’t feel they can rely on adults… There are about thirty different kinds of job children are doing - children usually start collecting bottles or begging when they come to the street but very soon they are getting involved in criminal activities - involved in prostitution - they start using drugs, drinking, smoking."

Obviously there are health risks as well. Médecins du Monde runs a drop-in centre which offers girls and boys who live on the street medical, social, and psychological support. Paediatrician Lena Cherkassova says that as well as dealing with many burns and injuries, they have many cases of diseases connected with drug addiction: hepatitis C, hepatitis B - and HIV/AIDS. "We get many girls coming to our centre who are involved in the sex business who make money for drugs and for their needs by selling sex. The blood tests results in 2001 showed that every tenth child whose blood was tested was HIV positive -and don’t forget we are talking about children aged between 14 and 18."

Dima has been living on the streets for the last four years, and now he sleeps in an abandoned car. He frequently runs away from state shelters, he’s been ill several times and visits the centre when he needs help. His parents like many others in St Petersburg sold their city centre apartment to opportunists - leaving the entire family homeless - they were alcoholics and beat him. Psychiatrist Michael Nikitin says he has mental problems and his outlook is not good. "He can’t stay in shelters more than five days because he is a very active, very aggressive person. I think he will be a criminal. In two or three years he will be sent to the prison or to the hospital with some disease."

There are some successes. Many of those who come to an IPEC centre to meet up with other families who have faced similar problems are rehabilitated. Svetlana was picked up on the streets when her mother couldn’t cope, but is now back at school. "These classes are really useful and interesting for us - we learn lots of new things - we have to talk about our experiences and now were like one big happy family…"

Yuriy knows it’s only a matter of time before things on the street could get worse. His dream is to go back to a home where his mother and real father are together again, and he won’t get beaten by his drunken stepfather. Max harbours a secret desire to return to school and study to be a doctor. But the outlook for them is grim.

Alexei Boukharov, National Programme Manager of the ILO IPEC project in Russia, says: "Russia should think about its children - those children can still become normal citizens, can become mothers, can become soldiers, can become workers who will work for the prosperity of Russia… And if we do not support them now, they will become street people - useless people who will be a burden to the state. Now we have got only one generation of street children who are in the age bracket of lets say 7 to 18 right and most of them will grow up and have their own children and this will create street people… The main barrier we are facing is a lack of understanding. This issue is still underestimated."

TRANSCRIPT Read the full transcript of Cheated of Childhood

SundayMirror.co.uk - News - G8 LEADS TO STREET KIDS BAN:

"16 July 2006

By Will Stewart And Gary Anderson

STREET children in St Petersburg have been banished to remote camps as the G8 Summit takes place in the city.

The Russian authorities have clamped down on the city’s ‘rogue elements’ in an attempt to improve the country’s image on the world stage.

Thousands of kids usually roam the streets but the city’s Mayor Valentina Matevienko deemed them an unsuitable sight for Tony Blair, George Bush and their colleagues.

As the G8 summit approached, a series of raids was staged on the underground and parks to round up the children.

Some were forced to go back to drunk or violent parents but most were taken to a ‘distribution centre’ before being moved outside the city.

TONY Blair warned last night that ‘urgent action’ was needed in the Middle East as he arrived for the summit. ‘The implications are very serious,’ he said."

Street Kids Snap Their Way Out of the Shadows

Wednesday, June 28, 2006. Issue 3441. Page 8.
By Alastair Gee
Staff Writer

Fifteen teenagers took part in the project. Their pictures are sometimes unsettling, sometimes unremarkable.

A boy squats in a basement, his eyes wide and crazed. He is enveloped by concrete walls. Rusting pipes criss-cross the floor. A pack of cigarettes lies on a mattress blackened with mold and dirt.

No one knows the name of the boy, his age, where he comes from or what diseases may be flowing through his bloodstream. His anonymity is stark and, at moments, overbearing.

Seeking to help such street children overcome their invisibility, Belgian photographer Jorge Dirkx, working with Medecins Sans Frontieres, recently gave 15 of them disposable cameras and asked them to take pictures of their Moscow. The boy in the basement is just one of the many images to emerge from the month-long project.

The children behind the pictures are 13 to 18 years old. Most, if not all, of the shooters and their subjects come from homes in Moscow and the Moscow region, and earn up to 8,000 rubles ($300) a month stealing for gangs, unloading crates at markets or, in some cases, selling their bodies. Many are infected with tuberculosis or HIV. Come winter, pneumonia strikes.

Many of the pictures are remarkable for being unremarkable. Zhenya, 17, photographed two of his friends in a snow-covered backyard, their arms slung around each other, the ghost of a smile painted onto their faces. In another, someone has turned the camera on Zhenya himself. Donning a leather jacket, he strikes a defiant, James Dean pose, one denim-clad leg thrust forward.

Initially, the street children, being untethered to any particular place, appeared to take more pictures of their friends than their surroundings. But as the project progressed, the subjects, the images, the underlying thought processes shifted.

Artur snapped a street scene with a Stalin skyscraper in the background. Moscow appears almost impossibly beautiful. The sky is a lush blue; the turreted giant not far away looks like a fairy-tale palace. Zhenya captured a group of homeless people bathed in a bright, discombobulating sunlight at once cheery and incongruous, and then decided to take a picture of his shadow stretching across some steps.

Art of this kind is sometimes called Outsider Art — a genre designating works produced by people considered foreign to the world of art schools and galleries and so-called polite society: the homeless, psychiatric patients, the people who have been forced onto the margins. The children had only one workshop on the ABC’s of picture-taking. None of their images suggest great talent or even a basic grasp of the interplay between subject and object. They have a hard time, as might be expected from any adolescent photographer, manipulating light and color.

A melancholy rain scene outside a metro is blurry and skewed but with no apparent end in mind. Flash has been used liberally: A girl named Alyssa looms pale in the gloom of a darkened room, a brilliant circle of light in the mirror next to her reflecting the outline of the photographer.

"It was a surprise that people came to train us," Zhenya said at the opening of the exhibition earlier this month, talking quietly as he stared at the floor. "No one cares about us."

Moscow’s street children sleep in metro stations or underneath platforms in rail stations, which are heated in winter to keep snow from accumulating. The warmth also attracts stray dogs and rats. Last year, a boy was bundled into a car and raped by three men.

Street children’s heights are often stunted by malnutrition. If they have money, they spend it on hot dogs, Coca-Cola and glue, which they sniff.

MSF operates a day center and has teams of doctors and psychiatrists to monitor the children, whose numbers are unknown, but it has no control over what happens on the streets. Since the project wrapped up, in March, one of the children has contracted pneumonia. Another has disappeared.

Russia’s Ruined Youth

A rocky transition toward democracy.

Short photoessay on a young street boy.

Russia has 1 million street children

The Korea Herald : The Nation’s No.1 English Newspaper:

"There are more than 1 million street children in Russia, according to government figures.

The street children are known as ‘bezprizornye’ in Russian, which literally means ‘left without supervision.’ The numbers soared in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

According to the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (DWB), some are the children of homeless parents, while others are from alcoholic families. Russia has one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world.

In the case of 17-year-old Olya, she left on her own. She no longer attends school and sleeps in a train station in Moscow, the capital of Russia.

‘My mother wants to live alone, that is why I came here.’ she told Agence France-Presse. ‘She doesn’t care whether I come back home or not.’

Many of the street children survive by stealing and prostitution. Nearly 25 percent of crimes in Russia involve underage youths, according to Vladimir Ustinov, Russia’s chief prosecutor.

Since 2004, DWB has set up programs to help Moscow’s street children. The organi- zation’s work ranges from washing the children’s clothes to offering medical services. It has also built 10 temporary shelters.

Still, the sole work of DWB may not be enough. Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to deal with the problem of street children. However, there has been little progress.

Before the Soviet Union dissolved, ‘the state used to do a lot for children,’ said Marina Makhtinova, DWB’s educational specialist. ‘But this country has undergone a very deep social shock.

‘The economic situation is better now, but it will take years for the social situation to improve.’

Russia has a population of 145 million, according to the United Nations. Russia’s child population is 30 million.

By Ethen Kim Lieser

On the Street: Kids Struggle to Survive in Russia
By Charlene Israel
CWNews

CWNews.com –In Russia dysfunctional families and the lack of a social safety net has put thousands of children on the street.

In the city of Perm there are street kids everywhere. They’re on the streets because they are trying to escape physical abuse at home or an orphanage.

But even on the streets they have plenty of problems. Their parents were violent, and so are they. Their parents get drunk, the children sniff glue.

In winter the children live in sewers and basements, and in summer under bushes and on store roofs. Their families don’t care, and the government is too poor to help.

With no one to help them, these children have no hope for a future.

But in 1996, Christina and Jared Markoff, the daughter and son of a Christian missionary, moved to Perm and decided to help.

Christina and Jared call their operation Love’s Bridge. They do street outreach, such as giving away food and clothing to these children. They’ve opened two shelters-one for kids to live in fulltime, and a ‘day shelter’ for kids still on the streets.

At the day shelter the street kids can clean up, get a meal, and play games.

Jared remembered, "When I was little, 4 or 5 years old, my dad used to read us Bible stories as we went to sleep. He mostly read to us from the Gospels, the things Jesus did and His works. Those things stick with me and I remember them a lot when I do this work."

The children tell horrific stories of living on the streets. They’ve been beaten, raped, and kidnapped.

Many have resorted to prostitution to survive. They’ve experienced more evil and hatred than most people can imagine.

Slava lived on the streets for five years; he was kidnapped by some men for a week and forced to perform sex acts, which the men photographed and sold to the porn industry. Today, he can talk about it, but barely. Instead, he prefers to talk of his future. Now he lives at the fulltime shelter and goes to school. Considering what’s he’s been through, he appears to be doing well.

But Sasha isn’t doing as well. He’s addicted to sniffing glue, and he’s currently at a psychiatric hospital, where’s he’s undergoing treatment for his addiction.

Christina goes to visit him, and give him food. After two tries she’s finally allowed to see him, but only under the watchful eye of the head doctor.

Sasha tries to be tough, but breaks down in tears, and begs Christina to take him away from the hospital. Russians consider addiction a mental illness, and treatment includes incarceration and heavy doses of drugs.

Christina told us, "If they act up, sometimes they’re tied to their bed for up to three days at a time. When we talked to the nurse, she said that they’re given shots up to three times a day. And she said, if they ever act up or do what they’re not supposed to do, they’re given even stronger shots."

She added, "We’ve met children who’ve been here up to 11 times, so that shows the treatment does not work, like the doctors here would hope."

There are homeless children everywhere, but the problem has been especially severe in Russia over the past 15 years. Communism’s collapse led to chaos, but there are other explanations as well.

Christina explained, "We know that more alcohol is drunk per head in Russia than in any other country in the world. So the uniqueness [of the problem here] is that the amount of strong alcohol drunk does contribute to the break down of the family structure, more so than in other countries." She added, "So you have more families breaking up. And, I think it’s more in the culture [here] to hit your children when they’re errant."

Christina and Jared’s work is difficult and demands patience, love and courage. It’s not work for the squeamish. On a regular basis they deal with violence and suicide.

And they deal with the heartbreak of seeing kids end up buried in Perm’s enormous cemetery.

Today, some former street kids are looking for the grave of an old friend named Masha who was barely 12 when she was found dead in a sewer five years ago.

She may have been murdered. After hours of searching, her old friends find her grave.

Jared told us, "Masha was found dead by the police when she was 11 years old. She was in one of Perm’s sewers. They just took her out of the sewer and threw her to the side, and her body lay there all night. And when her mother heard about it, she said, ‘Thank God that girl is dead’."

Jared said further, "We’ve been able to save several hundred kids from the streets, but I would say about 8 of the children I know personally have died."

Jared and Christina are Christians. They do introduce the street kids to Jesus Christ, but they don’t proselytize. So, the kids don’t have to become Christians to receive help from Love’s Bridge.

Both Christina and Jared say their mission is love, service, and prayer, and they know that God is with them.

Jared said, "I’ve experienced many of ‘the little miracles’. He added, "The main miracle is that God has never let us down, we’ve never come to the point where we’ve had to turn a child away, close a center, or give up our work and leave."

Go to the Love’s Bridge Web site.

One million street kids:

10/03/2005 15:27 - (SA)

Moscow - Russia has more than one million street children, and one crime in four involves underage youths, Russia’s chief prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov said on Wednesday.

‘Officially, the number of children without supervision is more than 700 000,’ Ustinov told members of the lower chamber, the Duma. However, experts believe the real figure ‘has long been over one million.’

The estimate includes a large proportion of homeless children, but also children of alcoholic parents who, although they have a home, are in fact left to fend for themselves.

Delinquency is also high, with one crime out of four either carried out by an underage youth or involving one, Ustinov said.

In 2001, Russia’s then deputy premier Valentina Matviyenko had already estimated the number of street children to over one million.

Russia’s overall population was estimated earlier this year by the United Nations to be around 143 million people. - AFP"

One million street kids
10/03/2005 15:27  - (SA)  

Moscow - Russia has more than one million street children, and one crime in four involves underage youths, Russia’s chief prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov said on Wednesday.

"Officially, the number of children without supervision is more than 700 000," Ustinov told members of the lower chamber, the Duma. However, experts believe the real figure "has long been over one million."

The estimate includes a large proportion of homeless children, but also children of alcoholic parents who, although they have a home, are in fact left to fend for themselves.

Delinquency is also high, with one crime out of four either carried out by an underage youth or involving one, Ustinov said.

In 2001, Russia’s then deputy premier Valentina Matviyenko had already estimated the number of street children to over one million.

Russia’s overall population was estimated earlier this year by the United Nations to be around 143 million people. - AFP

Kids struggle to survive Moscow streets

Baltimore Sun
January 20, 2002
Many youths prefer homelessness to cruel treatment in shelters
By Douglas Birch
Sun Foreign Staff

MOSCOW - They flutter through the Kursky railway station like flocks of dirt-smudged pigeons, sniffing glue fumes out of plastic bags, begging for money from strangers and scattering as police approach waving nightsticks.

These are Russia’s lost children, part of an army of millions of homeless boys and girls who have fled unhappy homes or escaped from the harsh discipline in state orphanages. Mobs of them, some as young as 5, haunt the capital’s subway stations, highway underpasses and railroad terminals.

The Kursky railway station, just east of central Moscow, is home to about 150 children who have drifted here from all over the former Soviet empire. By day, they roam the city, begging in subways and stealing what they can from shops. At night, they return to the station.

It is a filthy, disease-ridden and violent home. Some of the boys and girls work as prostitutes. Some have contracted hepatitis or HIV. After a day of begging, some wander holding bags containing glue over their mouths to get high. Others discreetly inhale the fumes under their coats, hiking their collars.

Station police occasionally administer what seem to be random beatings. Early Friday, two uniformed officers cornered a boy of about 16 in a station entrance. One slammed the boy with a truncheon as more than a dozen bystanders watched. Then the police led the youth away.

The children’s begging and stealing create problems for passengers, said another policeman, who would not give his name. "They say that we beat them and take money from them," he said, "but we don’t."

Why do the children stay? "The police beat them here," said Pavel Novikov, an evangelical Christian who feeds homeless children at the railway station. "But they don’t get beaten as often as in the shelter."

Sasha Vasiliyev, 17, said he came to the railway station in 1991, at age 6, after his parents died. When he was 10, authorities sent him to an orphanage in his hometown outside Moscow. He stayed about 18 months. The routine was boring and the discipline harsh: As punishment, the director sometimes forced children to stand shirtless in the winter cold.

Vasiliyev returned to the station. The police periodically try to evict him. "They push me out into the street, even if it is minus-30 outside, and they say, ‘Never come back here!’" he said. But he returns.

Jan Korin, 8, arrived a few months ago from Belarus. He keeps his 50-cent tubes of plastic cement in a plush yellow bag that hangs on a string around his neck. The glue has made his gaze wander and his movements jerky. He cockily claimed he was happy sleeping in his nook, a space on the concrete floor next to the gates to the subway.

Where is his mother? "I miss her," he said, tears making his brown eyes seem larger. "Though my mother sometimes hit me, I still love her."

Jan’s older sister, Tatiana, loitered in the station’s underground shopping arcade, her face bathed in the light of a video game. She claims to be 16; her brother said her 13th birthday was coming up soon. Asked about her mother, she didn’t look up from the video game.

"I don’t know where she is," she said. "She doesn’t care about us, so why should I care about her? I have a little brother to feed and clothe."

Their prospects are growing worse because of the gentrification of the neighborhood. In November, merchants and city officials ordered the Salvation Army to stop feeding homeless adults out of the back of a truck. In December, police swept through Kursky and other railway stations, rounding up homeless children and detaining them overnight.

"It appeared we were being blamed for the crime rate," said Gordon Lewis, the Salvation Army’s coordinator for social services in Moscow.

Now there are rumors that another sweep is imminent, inspired by President Vladimir V. Putin’s declaration last week that Russia’s efforts to solve the problem of "the neglected" have failed. Putin said in a letter to his prime minister, "Homeless children and the criminalization of teen-agers has reached threatening proportions."

His aides have promised a series of reforms to be introduced in coming weeks.

Advocates for the homeless say that at least 10,000 children live on the capital’s streets and that at least 90 percent are from outside Moscow. Only three shelters, with a total capacity of several hundred, are willing to accept them. One of the shelters is reserved for minors charged with committing serious crimes; the others are officially limited to use by legal residents of Moscow.

Dzera Oxana, a lawyer who works with homeless children, says a police lieutenant tried to find places for some of the children rounded up in the sweep last month. "She took the list of orphanages and called all of them," Oxana said. "All of them told her to go to hell."

Lawmakers have passed many measures to protect homeless and runaway children, but critics say that responsibility for the children is divided among agencies lacking the expertise, money and desire to act.

"I worked in a district administrative office whose task it was to deal with homeless children," said Lelit Karagyan, who now runs a group home. "Speaking honestly, the only thing they do is to fill in a lot of forms."

Moscow officials have promised to open seven new orphanages within two years. But activists caution that the orphanages will be little help without better rehabilitation programs and more trained social workers. And authorities, they say, should change their regulations to make it easier to open group homes and place children in foster care.

"Why do they run away from orphanages? Because of the way they are treated," Novikov said. "There are very few orphanages where they express love for the children."

Twice a week, Novikov loads chicken soup, bread and tea into the back of an old Land Rover and drives to the station parking lot. Authorities do not welcome him there. Police have twice detained him and told him to stop feeding the children. Novikov, who receives financial support from a network of Christian churches, has refused. He can’t forget the shock of his first night at the station last fall.

He had come determined to preach. He quickly realized that more than words were needed. "The children were intoxicated, and they were hungry," he said. "And after that moment, I decided that I had to feed them, to give them a place to stay and to eat. Just to express God’s care for them."

At 2:30 a.m. Friday, the Land Rover rolled into the parking lot. Children raced out of the station. Novikov and two friends prayed in the front seat, then climbed out and served food to the growing crowd.

Novikov noticed that one of the regulars - Ivan Chernov, 16 - was missing. Friends said he had been so badly beaten by police that he couldn’t get up out of bed.

Novikov carried a bag of food through the rail yards, across a garbage dump and over a concrete wall to Chernov’s home - a hut built of cardboard and old bedsheets in the roofless ruins of a building. The teen-ager lay under a pile of filthy blankets; the temperature was 26 degrees.

Inside the railway station, none of the children seems to think much about what might happen tomorrow. That would be too painful. "They are not killing us outright," said Vasiliyev, the longtime station resident. "They are killing us gradually."

Yelena Ilingina of The Sun’s Moscow bureau contributed to this article.